All politics is autobiography

A pop-up campaign for the final days of the Campaign.

All politics is autobiography. We tell our stories in who we vote for and what issues we support.   While every woman has her own story, we help write each other’s. And Hillary Rodham Clinton is helping re-write the story of us all.

POLITICAL MEMORIES

The 50’s: my first political memory is that of my family watching the 1952 Republican Convention on one of the few televisions in Jackson County, Iowa.  When my older sister started marching around the house with a homemade I Like Ike poster on a broom, I asked for a sign for Ike’s opponent Robert Taft.  I was four at the time and recall liking Taft for his small stature.  When he lost the nomination, they had to come looking for me on the backstairs where I sat with my sign, feeling bereft.  The first of many losses. And many conventions.

The 60s: And so it was four years later with similar enthusiasm, my sister now 13 and I aged 8, watched the 1956 Democratic Convention and were both attracted to one Sen. Kennedy from MA.  The Vice-Presidential nomination had been thrown open to the convention and hopefuls had one day to organize. There were three ballots in all. Kennedy came within 15 votes of winning the second.  But on the third roll call, any previous “favorite-sons”hold-outs went to Estes Kefauver. But who would ever forget the movie-star looks of the first-term Senator who lost. Certainly not one 8-year-old in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.